Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

as a canonical author whose work should be studied and interpreted rather than simply
enjoyed (Ross 246).
The first academic program in English literature was established at the University
of London in 1828, observes Ross (246), which marks the official birth of an “academic”
canon of English literature, whose texts could consequently appear in textbooks and
anthologies. In addition, Guillory explains that the polarization of works into distinct
classes and genres following a High/Low paradigm had some considerable effect on
which texts were to be presented to the students:
The division of literary production into “literature” and the genres
which are by definition subliterary or nonliterary does eventually
produce a corresponding linguistic distinction when genres are
distributed by the curricula of the educational institution in order to
separate them out according to the levels of the system. Already in
the early nineteenth century certain “popular” works are relegated
to the lower levels of the system, other “serious” works to the
higher, and this sorting out across the vertical structure of the
educational system, initially very modest, is gradually more
marked over the succeeding century and a half. (Cultural Capital
133)
The above statement hints at how, progressively, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the
High/Low polarities which had been firmly implanted in the processes of canon-
formation and dissemination since their earlier inceptions would be consecutively and
repetitively re-assessed, questioned, toppled, and re-asserted.
The importance of criticism was cemented by Matthew Arnold in essays such as
“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” and in various of his prefaces to works
of poetry, where he not only reasserted the pertinence of criticism in reading and
understanding literature, but argued that both criticism and literature had serious
pragmatic implications: "[Poetry] is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a
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